Sunday, January 30, 2011

LeRoy Thompson & Dick Goddard – EHHS Photographers

We owe these guys a debt of gratitude for their perseverance in roaming the hallways so many years ago, taking the pictures for our yearbooks and whatever copies of the school newspaper still survive. Now I know that any excuse for getting out of class to do something more interesting was an enjoyable perk and taking pictures isn’t too strenuous. Yet, for the most part, whatever visual record we have left from those years at EH is to the credit of LeRoy and Dick. LeRoy was a school yearbook photographer all three years he was there, 1960-63, and was one of the top class scholars. I think he worked with Steve Franks (’62) for a year or two.

During the years my offspring were growing up I noticed that the photographic quality of their yearbooks was not as good as ours of the early 1960s. One likely reason for that is that LeRoy and Dick used a medium format camera which can be seen in the accompanying picture of the two of them. By the time our offspring went through those years, everyone was using smaller format 35mm cameras…the pictures just weren’t as sharp, largely due to the smaller negatives.

Both Dick and LeRoy are still living in the DFW area as far as I know. It would be a good project for someone in the area to look them up to see if, per chance, they still have those old negatives packed away in a closet. If so, we could pull some sharp scans from them that would knock your socks off.

Any volunteers?

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram negatives from the 1960s are in the Special Collections section of the University of Texas at Arlington Library. Electronic copies of specific pictures in a .tiff or .jpg format can be purchased for a nominal fee. You would need to be able to estimate the date of the picture with some accuracy in order to narrow the librarian’s search for the right picture. The closer, the better.